I am now a novelist! I have spent the month of November typing furiously - I typed 50,795 words, to be exact. I did this to participate in National Novel Writing Month - fondly known as NaNoWriMo. 10 years ago Chris Baty, the founder, got together with 20-something friends of his and they all decided to write a novel in a month. If I recall correctly, six of them made it to the end. :-) As this year's NaNoWriMo ends, 119269 people have signed up, and 18,229 of them have written novels of 50,000 words or more, in the month of November 2008. Collectively, all the writers have written almost 1.5 billion words.
I did this mostly for fun, partly for school, and partly to see if it actually could be done - it can! It was so cool. I would write mostly at night, and I managed to stay fairly on target the whole month, even finishing a little bit early. I typed 'The End' at 1:15 this morning, and then was so excited I didn't go to bed until three.
Now the questions that everyone wants to know: Can I read it? No. Not for a while, anyway. What is it about? Top secret, but it's not historical fiction. How many people died? Ugh . . . nobody died! (I can't tell you how many times my family has asked me that.)
It is a fun and trying experience to be a novelist. Anything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on writers block, and at certain times housework may be neglected - pressing deadlines, you know.
So now I get to return to a more normal mode of living - one where you don't use the word count function every fifteen minutes. Next year, I'm looking for more people to join me and we can have word wars. :-)
Tonight I went back to my previous hobby/addiction - LibriVox. It's so nice to read someone else's words for a change!
In upcoming life, I get to participate in a performance of Handel's Messiah next week, which will hopefully help me to recover from post-noveling blues. :-) I can't wait!
Megan
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